How A (Non-Apple) U.S. Patent Might Just Change the World

Yesterday in California, an ostensively historic brouhaha took center stage in Federal Court over smartphone patents between technology titans Apple and Samsung. Depending on the final outcome, the case may prove momentous not simply because Apple is seeking an unprecedented $2.5B in damages, but because the nature of Apple's patent infringement claims against its rival hinge on particular design elements of its iPhone that may ormay not have “changed the world.”

Wait just a second. A two and a half billion dollar lawsuit based not on the technological guts of the iPhone? (That's correct.) In a case that doesn't even pit the actual Android operating system in Samsung's mobile devices against Apple's iOS? (You got it.)

The fundamental aspects of Apple's legal arguments can be distilled to: Is it rectangular in shape? Does it have a glass face? Are its corners rounded instead of sharp? Very well then, there's an app—I mean a patent—for that. And Apple professes to hold it. You see, it's not the thing itself—it's the structures that “make it happen” that matter.

In the coming weeks (and months and years ahead), millions of words will be written about Apple v. Samsung, Apple vs. Android, and Apple vs. the World by people more qualified than I to comment on the ongoing tech wars. But another patent—albeit one with less attendant fanfare—might conceivably alter the shape of U.S. debt markets for years to come in ways that are analogous to the design characteristic claims at the root of Apple's suit against Samsung.

But the IP announced today extends protection to TriCap and its core ARxChange platform over the organization, sorting, ranking, valuing, and posting of debt and accounts receivable across all U.S. consumer markets, not only those derived from the healthcare industry. Specifically, IP # 8234209 affords TriCap exclusive rights to whenever receivables in any market are:

organized by a computer into a portfolio

sorted

ranked

scored whereas the final score represents the collect-ability and base value of the portfolio

and whereas the final score is posted to a secure website on the Internet.

The implications of adding this second IP to TriCap's patent portfolio are at once elementary and (quite possibly) revolutionary. Simply put, the patent secured today by TriCap seems to substantiate an acknowledgment by the USPTO that the basic attributes of how the debt purchasing and servicing market functions in the ARM industry are indeed patentable. Transformative in that IP # 8234209 appears to govern the structure of an entire market, agnostic of asset class or type of receivable.

Still a bit opaque? Consider this. With much of the country buzzing about the final season of AMC's Breaking Bad, it might be instructive to draw on an analogy from the Periodic Table of Elements to explain exactly what TriCap's latest IP means to the U.S. debt markets.